Daniel

“The twenty-year-olds sob, lament the only death that could have sealed off their youth, that of the magnificent lover they invented all together, whom they invoked through their prayers and incantations on nights when species vanished, whom they brought to life through witchcraft set down in ink composed of tears, blood, sperm, great symbols traced on hardwood or warmed ceramic, this lovely villain who would have spirited them away far from their beggar fathers, who would have made them princes in golden palaces, so go the thoughts of those who are so inspired; while the others tell themselves simply that he would have made it possible for them to live. A choir, to assuage absence and impotence. Listen to the vibrant song of new sorrows. They are of a race that sings under torture; they have no understanding of laws; they have no moral sense, they are brutes; do not be mistaken.”
― Kevin Lambert, Querelle de Roberval

“Once again," he said, "we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically."
"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't care enough. I told you."
He swung his feet up onto the intrument panel and picked fitfully at something on one of his fingernails.
"But unless we determine to take action," said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, "then we shall be destroyed; we shall all die. Surely we care about that?"
"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put on a sort of hollow smile and flipped it around the room at anyone who wanted to see it.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution

“In addition, the Non-Profit Industrial Complex promotes a social movement culture that is non-collaborative, narrowly focused, and competitive. To retain the support of benefactors, groups must compete with each other for funding by promoting only their own work, whether or not their organizing strategies are successful. This culture prevents activists from having collaborative dialogues where we can honestly share our failures as well as our successes. In addition, after being forced to frame everything we do as a "success", we become stuck in having to repeat the same strategies because we insisted to funders they were successful, even if they were not. Consequently, we become inflexible rather than fluid and everchanging our strategies, which is what a movement for social transformation really requires. And as we become more concerned with attracting funders than with organizing mass-based movements, we start niche marketing the work of our organizations. Framing our organizations as working on a particular issue or a particular strategy, we lose perspective on the larger goals of our work. Thus, niche marketing encourages us to build a fractured movement rather than mass-based movements for social change.”
― Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex